Here’s how enterprise AI companies are responding to ROI concerns

An August MIT report roiled AI-forward businesses after it found that 95% of companies are seeing no return on their AI investments. It was a sucker punch for business leaders trying to wrap their heads, and budgets, around an increasingly essential part of the corporate tool kit. If your boss forwarded you an email entitled “SOS: the 411 on AI ROI,” it might have come from an AI bot trying to save itself.

These AI platform providers and users told Revenue Brew they haven’t been discouraged by early results and gave us insight into what could be coming down the pike.

Not Gong anywhere

Revenue AI company Gong is by no means the new kid on the block when it comes to sales enterprise AI. It’s confident in the path it’s on and working with customers to become more effective.

According to Gong’s co-founder and CPO Eilon Reshef, this means going beyond being an agent and tapping into its software roots to find the best solutions for specific sales tasks.

“The real value actually hasn’t changed in the last decade, which is you need good enterprise software infused with AI and that is aligned with your business processes, which is where Gong is heading…because that’s what we think the industry is heading,” Reshef said.

Gong has already identified time-sucking tasks as a major pain point. This was the basis for its new product Orchestrate, designed to centralize information and quickly provide next steps for tasks like follow-ups and customer handoffs.

“This is an automation script, like an agent that does things for them, collects all of the historical information and makes it a no-brainer,” Reshef told Revenue Brew. “So it’s both automation and a reminder system.”

Because AI is a “moving target,” according to Reshef, results will come at different paces.

Apollo(.ROI)

Sales intelligence and prospecting platform Apollo.io measures AI success in two ways: increase in customer revenue and time savings. For Radu Vaduva, Apollo’s lead solutions consultant, this means creating effective products and infrastructure for humans using those products.

“The hardest part about it is not the tech, it’s the people. Because people typically worry about losing control or needing to add, let’s say, a data scientist to use the AI in the right way, what we try to build at Apollo is we try to fit the Apollo tool specifically the AI workflows into their daily motion as opposed to replacing it,” Vaduva said.

Earlier this month, Apollo.io launched a new agentic end-to-end GTM platform that includes functions such as agentic data enrichment and agentic outbound. It allows customers access to all GTM data, workflows, and execution recommendations in one platform.

“It preserves the context… and it makes all of your data richer and that turns into better insights and better ROI,” Vaduva said.

Customers are confident

Bob Pritchard, CRO at digital automation platform Vasion, is always looking to add new components to his tech stack. He finds the biggest inefficiencies come at the integration stage as a side effect of an industry still organizing itself.

“As I look at tools, they’ve got to be able to integrate with Salesloft and Salesforce, and so that seems to be the biggest challenge as we look at different tools in the market,” he said.

Pritchard seems convinced, however, that the potential mastery of AI is worth his current investment.

“[For some] it’s gone from hype to complete lack of trust and faith. We’re on board with the commitment to it because we see the potential,” Pritchard said. “It’s just harder than anyone expected to make it work, and we want to do it right. ”